Most decent text based Unix shell newsreaders, for instance trn, allow you
to mark selected headers and save the corresponding messages to a file (in
Unix mailbox
format or rnews format). You can then download this file with, for
instance, zmodem
and import it into yarn.
The text based Unix shell program, uqwk, also has the ability to operate in
``summary mode'' and download only the headers of your news group to your
pc, in a soup packet. You can then use one of various dos programs to mark
and delete the summaries you dont want to read. You then upload the summary
file
back to Unix, and uqwk downloads, only those messages that correspond to
headers in the edited summary file. I always thought it was wasted
processing to download,
summaries to dos, edit them, upload them again to unix, and then download
the
messages to dos. Therefore, when uqwk delivered me a list of summaries, I
edited them right then and there in Unix with a text editor, and downloaded
my
messages from the edited list.
I do not download news directly from a server using PPP, so I dont know what
possibilities programs like Souper, etc. offer in terms of summary lists.
However, you are right about yarn: One of its major deficiencies has always
been an inability to mark message headers and perform some global operation
(e.g., delete, save
to file) on messages so marked. There are programs like readmail and
yfolder
(it comes with the yes editor package) that do have the ability to mark or
``select''
headers in yarn folders and news groups and then perform operations on them.
I know some windows-based news readers like the freeware news express, work
by
first downloading summary headers, and then retrieving from the news server
only
those messages whose headers you select. If you really wanted to, I expect
you
could use such programs to save a file of messages, chosen by headers, and
then
use yarn to read the file offline.